Teaching Scientific Literacy

Description

This courses focuses on the development of pre-service teachers' scientific literacy. Using a multiliteracies framework, the course explores scientific knowledge as represented in written, graphic, and digital forms. It aims to assist students to make connections between scientific knowledge as generated through disciplined inquiry, and questions derived from their everyday experiences. It will assist teachers to represent and communicate scientific ideas, understandings and information; and to teach scientific concepts competently to their future students.

Availability

Ourimbah

Trimester 2 - 2015

Learning Outcomes

1. An understanding of the competing definitions of scientific literacy;

2. An understanding of the multimodal forms of scientific communication;

3. A knowledge of a wide range of practices and texts supporting the development of scientific literacy;

4. An understanding of how scientific knowledge may be related to students' everyday lives;

5. An ability to engage in discourse of and about science;

6. A capacity to evaluate the quality of scientific information on the basis of its source and the methods used to generate it.

7. A capacity to design instruction that challenges alternative conceptions of scientific phenomena.

Content

The Multiliteracies Framework.

Constructs of Scientific literacy.

Subject specific vocabulary, metalanguage, and language structures and features of scientific discourse.